Tablets, smart phones you can drop in water

Every year at CES, it seems some company has some electronic product that you can safely dunk in water. This year, it’s Fujitsu, which Sunday night showed off water resistant smart phones and a tablet computer.

On the surface, you’d have to question why anyone would want a tablet computer that is water resistant for up to 30 minutes in almost five feet of water. But then again, how many of you have lost mobile phones by dropping them in the toilet, spilling beer on them or forgetting to take them out of your jeans when you do the wash?

“One of the higher return rates of any mobile devices is (caused by) water damage,” said James Maynard, a Fujitsu product marketing director. “So if you’re spending that amount of money on technology equipment, it makes sense that it’s resistant against one of the biggest causes of damage to those devices.”

The water-resistant devices are available in Japan, but not yet in the United States. Maynard said the company is talking to major wireless carriers here, but doesn’t have any lined up yet. And he said Fujitsu wasn’t talking about how much they would cost.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the Android tablet, at least according to a company spec sheet, is called Arrows (perhaps because it can suffer the slings and … ) and can be controlled with hand gestures without touching the 10.1-inch screen.